Colorado’s revised state-specific roadless proposal, which the state filed with the Agriculture Department’s U.S. Forest Service earlier this month, would not block oil and natural gas leasing in the state, but it would not allow road-building for any future leasing in some protected national forest areas in Colorado, according to a spokesman with the Department of Natural Resources (DNR).

“Industry did not indicate that roadless areas were a high priority for them,” said the DNR’s Theo Stein. Moreover, he said a lot of the Colorado areas rich with natural gas tend to be in the basins and not the national forests, which would be subject to the revised roadless proposal.

Under Colorado’s new roadless proposal, well sites and facilities for existing leases in national forest areas are to be sited in pre-existing areas of surface disturbance, and the project design should minimize the amount of temporary and long-term temporary road construction or reconstruction. So far the state has issued approximately 81 leases on the Grand Mesa-Uncompahgre-Gunnison National Forest area, which takes up about 3.2 million acres on the western slope of the Colorado Rockies, according to Stein.

The proposal also would bar the construction of oil and natural gas pipelines through Colorado national forests unless they connect to infrastructure that is already sited in a roadless area and it is determined that such a connection would cause “substantially less environmental damage” than alternative routes.

And a power transmission line can only run through a Colorado national forest if it cannot be located outside a roadless area without causing “substantially greater environmental damage,” according to the state’s roadless proposal.

The state’s proposed roadless rule also would allow the coal industry to build temporary and long-term temporary roads for mining facilities to vent methane on 20,000 acres of the 4.2 million acres of roadless national forest in Colorado.

In addition, Colorado proposes to set aside 8,250 acres for road building associated with the expansions of 11 ski slope areas, which intersect with parts of the state’s existing roadless inventory in the national forests.

“I believe our petition sets forth a management regime that is better for Colorado and better for our roadless areas than the 2001 Roadless Areas Conservation Rule and thus serves the national interest,” wrote Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter in a letter to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack.

The 2001 plan, promulgated by the Clinton administration, placed 58 million acres of public lands across the country off-limits to road building for economic activities, such as oil and gas drilling. The 2001 rule has been the target of a number of legal challenges (see NGI, Aug. 18, 2008), with the most recent challenge made by the Obama administration in August 2009. The case still is pending before the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Wyoming.

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